Peoples of West Papua

New Guinea's indigenous peoples, the Papuans, with their
typically fuzzy to tightly-coiled hair and variably dark skins, are an
astonishingly diverse ethnic and linguistic assemblage, representing one
fifth of the world's languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger
than Texas. They are the variably intertwined descendants of two waves
of human expansion: an early one, when modern humans first drifted out
of Africa, and a much later one, during the last few millenia, out of
Southern China ultimately.

The first islanders

Eugène Dubois' famous 'Java Man' fossils from
Central Java in western Indonesia, represent the type material of Homo
erectus ('Upright Man'), and attest to the presence of pre-human
hominins on the Sunda Shelf as early as 1.8 million years ago. This is
roughly contemporaneous with the oldest finds of Homo erectus
in East Africa (sometimes treated as a different species, Homo ergaster
or 'Working Man'), and thus falls during the early Pleistocene, the epoch
from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago that spans Earth's recent period
of repeated glaciations. The Sunda Shelf is an extension of Asia's shallow
continental shelf, and during Pleistocene glacial maxima, when sea level
is variously estimated to have dipped 120 to 150 meters below its present
level, proto-humans could freely have wandered overland from mainland
Southeast Asia, across the Sunda landscape, to the present-day Greater
Sunda Islands of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali.

But there is also convincing evidence of overwater dispersal
by Homo erectus in the form of 840,000 year old stone tools that
have been recovered further east on the island of Flores along Indonesia's
Lesser Sunda island chain, separated from the Greater Sundas by the deep
and permanent Lombok Strait. That water barrier may actually have been
reduced down to 12 kilometers during Pleistocene glacial maxima, and hence
the assumed original peopling of a visible island by Homo erectus
may have been through sheer luck. In any case, Homo erectus got
stuck on Flores and by 38,000 years ago had evolved into a dwarfed form,
Homo floresiensis or 'Flores Man', through the same speciation
process of insular dwarfism observed in other contemporaneous animals
on Flores, including a species of the proboscidean genus Stegodon
on which the hominin apparently hunted cooperatively. Stegodon florensis
insularis vanished 12,000 years ago, but if the accounts of 16th
century Portuguese sailors are correct, 'Flores Man' may have survived
into recent times.

In any case, Homo floresiensis lived contemporaneously
with our own kind, Homo sapiens ('Wise Man'), which started to
drift out of Africa around 70,000 years ago and used the Lesser Sunda
Islands as stepping stones to reach the two hemi-continents of Australia
and New Guinea (then connected to one another in a single land mass, Greater
Australia) by 60,000 years ago, virtually completely replacing all other
earlier hominins in the process. The colonization of Greater Australia
by fully modern humans implied the crossing of a number of water channels,
the widest of which span 120 kilometers, beyond which Australia remained
invisible altogether. Mankind's first use of watercraft, possibly simple
bamboo rafts or canoes, is widely being invoked here, and the final stages
of this earliest eastward drift of modern humans, into the Bismarck and
Solomon archipelagos by 35,000 years ago, also had required significant
maritime travel. Elsewhere in the world, the first strong evidence of
watercraft arose only 13,000 years ago in the Mediterranean Sea.

The future-eaters

The first humans to enter Greater Australia encountered
giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and
reaching the size of a cow, a two-hundred-kilogram flightless bird, a
one-ton lizzard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles. This distinctive
megafauna became extint 35,000 years ago for reasons that are still prone
to some debate. If the dating of the arrival of humans around 60,000 years
ago at Lake Mungo in southern Australia is correct, this would mean that
megafauna and humans coexisted locally for about 25 millennia. However,
in many areas of Australia and New Guinea radiocarbon-dated sites attest
to the presence of humans between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago only, in
which case the arrival of humans coincides suspiciously with the disappearance
of the big beasts. Having evolved in complete isolation and therefore
likely showing no fear of humans, it really looks like the giants of Greater
Australia simply had the misfortune of suddenly being exposed to invading
modern humans with fully developed hunting skills, while climate change
may have been a contributory factor in dry areas of Australia. Whatever
the reason, while humans spread rapidly throughout Greater Australia and
successfully adapted to a wide range of difficult environments, from deserts
to montane rainforests, the disappearance of the megafauna had major consequences
for subsequent human history in Australia and New Guinea as it left humans
there without any potentially domesticable animals for food-production,
transportation and traction.

Masters of a difficult environment

After this initial peopling of Greater Australia there
is no compelling evidence of further human invasions into Australia or
New Guinea until the Austronesian expansion in the last few thousand years,
by a sea-faring people of ultimately South Chinese origin. Thus the original
Non-Austronesian settlers of Australia and New Guinea evolved in prolonged
isolation, not only from their founding populations in Southeast Asia,
but also from one another. For after the rising of the Arafura Sea, separating
Australia and New Guinea from each other around 10,000 years ago, at the
beginning of the Holocene, only tenuous contact remained between the two
hemi-continents along the chain of small Torres Strait islands.

Australia's Aborigines experienced firsthand that geography
just isn't fair. In the absence of natural resources, they remained nomadic
hunter-gatherers, living in small bands and with a limited total population
of only a few hundred thousand people, fragmented into several ecologically
more productive and populous regions, separated by vast expanses of thinly
populated desert. New Guinea swamp dwellers, like the Fayu, remained band-living
nomadic hunter-gatherers too, heavily depending on the starchy pith of
wild sago palms which yield three times more calories per hour's work
than does gardening. Lowland New Guineans on the seacoast, such as the
coastal Asmat, lived in permanent villages and relied heavily on fish,
while those on dry ground away from the coast and rivers, such as the
Korowai, subsisted at low densities by slash-and-burn agriculture based
on bananas and yams, supplemented by hunting and gathering. But a few
broad highland valleys along New Guinea's central cordillera, such as
the Baliem Valley of the Snow Mountains, the heartlands of the Dani people,
were the scene of independent development of technologically advanced
food production, in fact one of only nine areas in the world where agriculture
arose independently.

It is now generally acknowledged that agriculture arose
indigenously in the New Guinea highlands around 9,000 years ago by domestication
of New Guinea wild plant species. The founding crops were sugarcane, several
leafy vegetables, edible grass stems, bananas, taro and certain yams.
The development of New Guinea highland agriculture must have triggered
a big population explosion locally by 6,000 years ago, when complex systems
of drainage ditches in swampy areas and terraces on steep slopes become
widespread. By 5,000 years ago evidence from pollen analysis already testifies
to the widespread deforestation of highland valleys. The arrival of chickens
and pigs, domesticated in Southeast Asia and introduced to New Guinea
around 3,600 years ago by the Austronesians, must gradually have exacerbated
the pressure on remaining forests in the valleys. And by 1,200 years ago
the deforestation must have been so massive that a wood crisis triggered
a big surge in the silviculture of native Casuarina oligodon.
These fast-growing evergreen trees with leaves resembling pine-needles
and very hard but easily split wood, solved many problems associated with
deforestation, including wood supply and soil fertility. An even bigger
surge in casuarina silviculture between 600 and 300 years ago has been
linked to the Tibito tephra, an event of massive volcanic ashfall and
associated boost to soil fertility in the region. However, it also coincides
suspiciously with the presumed arrival of the Andean sweet potato Ipomoea
batatas in the New Guinea highlands. That crop is assumed to have
reached New Guinea through native trade after it was introduced in The
Philippines in the 16th century by Spaniards from its South American homelands.
Once established, the sweet potato overtook taro as the highlands' leading
crop because of its shorter time to reach maturity, higher yields per
acre, and greater tolerance of poor soil conditions, again leading to
local population increase.

New Guinea highlanders had developed sophisticated farming
methods, to the point that modern European agronomists haven't quite fathomed
yet why certain traditional methods work where well-intentioned European
farming innovations fail. However, the low protein content of dietary
staples, the lack of domesticated animals for traction, the overall limited
available area for highland agriculture, and the highly fragmented nature
of New Guinea's populations and the chronic warfare between them, kept
the total population of traditional New Guinea below one million, far
too low to develop the technology, writing and political systems that
arose among populations of tens of millions in Southwest Asia, China,
the Andes and Mesoamerica.

The Austronesians

In terms of the great distances it covered, the Austronesian
expansion was one of the biggest population movements of the past 6,000
years. It completed mankind's occupation of the most isolated permanently
habitable corners of our planet. Austronesian languages are spoken today
from Madagascar to Easter Island, across two-thirds of the world's circumference.
At the basis of this expansion stood the invention of the double-outrigger
sailing canoe, a stable watercraft for deep-sea fishing and long-range
maritime travel, still widely used in Indonesia today. Taiwan Strait,
separating the island of the same name from mainland Southern China, is
where the Austronesians initially developed the skills required for long-distance
overwater colonization. Following the successful occupation of Taiwan
around 5,500 years ago, the Austronesians worked their way south through
the Philippine archipelago around 5,000 years ago, to reach the islands
of Borneo, Sulawesi and Timor around 4,500 years ago, and the islands
of Java and Sumatra around 4,000 years ago. Around 3,600 years ago the
Austronesians suddenly appear in the New Guinea region, almost simultaneously
on the island of Halmahera in the Moluccas, in the Bismarck Archipelago,
and in the Solomon Islands.

Wherever the food-producing Austronesians settled, they
either completely replaced the previously established hunter-gatherers
or else reduced them to relic populations on suboptimal or marginal lands.
However, the Austronesians failed to make much headway on New Guinea itself,
presumably because the subcontinental island was already occupied by food-producing
Papuans in sufficiently high densities to resist the invaders. Closely
related Austronesian languages eventually did become established throughout
the Raja Ampat archipelago off New Guinea's western tip, much of the coastal
and insular Geelvink or Cenderawasih Bay region, and further in isolated
pockets along the northern and southeastern coasts of New Guinea. Today,
the speakers of these languages physically are variably intermediate between
highland Papuans with their dark skin and tightly coiled hair, and Malays
or Polynesians with their light skin and straight hair. Fine details of
the characteristics and distribution of Austronesian versus Non-Austronesian
or Papuan languages in northern New Guinea also attest to the prolonged
contact over thousands of years between the newly invading Austronesians
and the previously established Papuans. In fact, both the Austronesian
and Papuan languages of the region show massive influences from each other's
vocabulary and grammar, to the point that it is sometimes impossible to
determine whether a language is essentially Papuan with Austronesian influences
or the other way round.

The general picture that emerges of the Austronesians
in the New Guinea region is that they mostly persisted in low numbers
in coastal and off-shore areas as specialized craftsmen and long-distance
traders, heavily dependent on marine resources for subsistence, and that
they were gradually genetically and culturally diluted by the Papuans
through intermarriage. Uniquely, in the Raja Ampat archipelago, at the
crossroads between the Moluccas and New Guinea, a process of political
unification had begun among the Ma'ya people. These speakers of Austronesian
languages, but with typically Papuan cultural traits, already recognized
hereditary chiefs at times anterior to the emergence of influence from
the Moluccan Sultanate of Tidore over the region around 500 years ago.

Papuans can well
be proud of the accomplishments
of their ancestors. There is no
reason for any feelings of
inferiority just because, until relatively
recently, many Papuans lived in the
Stone Age. The lack
of technological advances did not
preclude a rich and complex
set of cultures with highly developed
agriculture allowing for large populations
with well-attended and complex
rituals. Modern agricultural technology
has not been able to improve yields
from the highly efficient traditional
farming methods in many areas, including
the Baliem Valley, Kolopom/Dolak Island
and elsewhere.K. Muller, 2008

The ongoing changes inIrian Jaya represent the continuation,
backed by a centralized government's
full resources, of the Austronesian expansion
that began to reach New Guinea 3,500 years ago. Indonesians
are modern Austronesians.J. M. Diamond, 1997

With time the Austronesian
expansion would certainly have
had more impact on New
Guinea. Western New Guinea
would eventually have been incorporated
into the sultanates of eastern
Indonesia, and metal tools
might have spread from eastern
Indonesia to New Guinea.
But that hadn't quite happened in 1511,
the year the Portuguese arrived in
the Moluccas and truncated Indonesia's
separate train of developments.J. M. Diamond, 1997